Ambush Marketing

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Jerry Welsh, one of the prominent marketing strategists, defines Ambush marketing as an associative marketing technique used by advertisers to capitalize on the awareness, attention, goodwill, and other benefits generated by some other entity or event without having a direct association with the entity or the event.

One can find a lot of examples of Ambush marketing around themselves right from online advertisement space to Out-of-Home advertisement space. However, one of the interesting forms of Ambush Marketing we come across these days is in search advertisements. If we talk in the customer buying journey realm, we cannot neglect the fact that search engines play a vital role between the awareness stage and consideration stage. Since most of the product search today start with Google, Baidu, Bing, or any other search engine, it becomes essential for the companies to appear in the top four positions in the search engine page result (SERP) to get a share of user’s attention. Thus, to be present in the top four spots, companies take help SEO (search engine optimization) techniques, search advertisements, and ambush marketing. One of the finest examples which I found in Ambush Marketing's context is as follows:

As we can see in the above example, competitor firms have bid on the magic bricks keyword so heavily that magic bricks' advertisement is being displayed at the fourth position. This is a classic example of Ambush Marketing in the search advertisement paradigm. The case mentioned above provides two crucial insights; firstly, from the competitor’s perspective, advertisers cannot heavily rely on just bidding higher sum on competitor’s keywords as eventually, their ad rank will drop over time due to negative correlation between their ads and the keywords. Hence, they would need more than just money to stay in the top four places. Secondly, from the company’s perspective, a company cannot rely just on the search engine optimization; they need to bid for their own keywords as well to fend off the competition from bidding on its keyword and stealing the leads.

Another dilemma that arises with the concept of Ambush Marketing in the search advertisement paradigm is; what is the optimum amount a company should bid to fend off the competition from bidding on its keyword because advertisement budget is limited. Well, unfortunately, there is no hard-coded formula available to answer this question. However, advertisers can get the hang of it with their bidding experience.

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